Work & the Black Messenger

[ish mailian]

The Black message, as Melville described it, is the Truth. It is Pip,
the Black boy in M-D,  who, having seen God's foot on the treadle of
the loom after he is abandoned by the crew, by the white men who hunt
the white whale, that, like the weavers in Remedios Varo's painting,
works the shuttle that weaves the tapestry that is the world, Pip, mad
Pip, like Lear's Fool, Pip, who knows the Black Truth, who is the
Black Messenger.

On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 11:00 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> In his "On Schlemiels in Thomas Pynchon’s “V” – Part II" Menachem
> Feuer focuses out attention on Benny's "depression" as he looks for
> work. In a section titled " The Schlemiel’s Epiphany," Feuer writes:
>
> The Schlemiel’s Epiphany
>
> Immediately following this reflection, Pynchon places Profane in an
> employment office marking his isolation and awkwardness. He is alone
> and “didn’t see Fina.” It’s as if his mother dropped him off. After
> filling out his employment application, something of an epiphany
> occurs by way of an African-American “holy messenger.” He wears a
> similar jacket to the one Profane usually wears (a black suede one):
> “As he handed the competed form to a girl at the desk, a messenger
> came through: A Negro wearing an old suede jacket….and for a second
> his eyes and Profane’s met” (157).
>
> Profane reflects on the mystical messenger and has an epiphany:
>
> Maybe Profane had seen him under the street of at one of the shapeups.
> But there was a little half-smile and a kind of half-telepathy and it
> was as I this messenger had brought a message to Profane too, sheathed
> to everybody but the two of them in an envelope of eyebeams touching,
> that said: Who are you trying to kid? Listen to the wind. (157)
>
> The fact that “he listened to the wind” suggests something prophetic
> about this epiphany. It announces a new moment in Profane’s life. And
> this is marked when, after the messenger leaves the room, he goes to
> the window and has a vision of the wind and his new, changed life.
> Now, it seems, he is truly free:
>
> It was as if he could see the wind, too. The suit felt wrong on him.
> Maybe it was nothing after all to conceal this curious Depression
> which showed up in no stock market year-end report. ‘Hey, where are
> you going’, said the receptionist. ‘Changed my mind,’ Profane told
> her. Out in the hall and going down in the elevator, in the lobby and
> in the street, he looked for the messenger, but couldn’t find him. He
> unbuttoned the jacket of old Mendoza’s suit and shuffled along
> Forty-Second Street, head down, straight into the wind. (157-58)
>
> A book can be written on the wind in Pynchon novels, but I'm
> interested in this encounter, this epiphany. The advice, to listen to
> the wind is a far more important idea than the one that critics have
> fixated on, the Keep Cool but Care, and though the two are related, to
> work of course, the gig of the jazzman's cool message, as Dinerstein
> discusses it at some length in his Origins of Cool book evolves,
> though that look in the eye, as Dinerstein describes it from Miles, so
> key to the cool, in any event, the Black Messenger in BE has lost his
> job, and here the messenger in V. provides the cool, the Black Man is
> always in a depression in the employment sense of it. When is
> unemployment ever not what half the household is?
>
> A few have noted the similarities of the Black Messenger in V. and the
> Black Messenger in BE.
> Why Black Messengers?
>
> Unemployment and the Cool of that Gig that is in the wind if you listen.
>
> And Benny, Pynchon here, he listening.
>
>
>
>
> posted earlier, but here is the link again:
> http://www.berfrois.com/2017/05/menachem-feuer-thomas-pynchons-v/
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